Pages

Saturday, 6 July 2013

This a guest post by Dr Morgan Healey. Morgan completed her PhD through the University of Limerick, Ireland, in 2009 focussing on Irish women politicians and their experiences of gendered political spaces.

Reading
the news (and in particular social media) yesterday I was incredibly
disheartened to see statements from both men and women MPs discounting the potential
Labour party policy calling for temporary special measures to ensure a 50:50
gender representation in the Caucus by 2017. It is a laudable goal for Labour
and one that all political parties should strive for. But the misogynist discussion
that followed the announcement of the policy showed exactly what women MPs have
to face within the political party machinery when it comes to fighting for
selection and running a successful campaign. The sophistry of equal opportunity
for women and the idea that ‘good’ women candidates do not require any
additional support because they will get elected on merit must be contested if
this debate is to move forward.

The
construction of politics as ‘jobs for the boys’ has created myriad barriers to
women entering politics. Research by feminist political scientists and theorists
has attempted to grapple with the gendering of political tenets, such as the
abstract individual, the social contract and those dealing with the systemic
limitations of not being selected to run, facing a political party system that
prioritises ‘proven’ men politicians, rewarding them with safe, winnable seats
(or a high number on the list), and so on. If women do manage to succeed, and
make their way through the myriad gates that block their inclusion to win a
seat and enter Parliament, the discrimination continues. Women with children
face non-family friendly working hours, for example, being away from home for
three nights a week, needing a relatively high and stable income to afford
child care and perhaps assistance in the home (with the assumption still that
if they are married their husbands will also be in paid work).

What
is insidious about all of this is the tightrope women politicians are forced to
walk between trying to belong (i.e. be the ‘same’ as the men politicians) and at
the same time using their gender to promote a ‘different’ way of doing politics
– one that simultaneously or strategically sets them apart for the sea of men.
It is within this context that I want to unpick some of the unhelpful comments
made by women MPs themselves, and argue that acts of belonging to the political
gendered norm (read men) are being played out in these comments. Specifically,
arguments against the proposal seem to be focus on notions of merit vs special
treatment, with the latter providing a dangerous precedent whereby a woman’s
gender can be used and named to detract from an already tenuous attempt at belonging.

I
have a bit of experience when it comes to women in politics.. My PhD thesis,
“The Naturalised Politician: How Irish Women Politicians Construct their
Political Subjectivities”, examined the lived experiences of then-serving women politicians in both the lower and upper house of Parliament (known
as the Oireachtas in Irish). I used a poststructural feminist framework to investigate
how the women I interviewed understood and articulated their own gendered
political subject positions as politicians, so please excuse some modest use of
this frame and some of the associated language below. While I won’t attempt to
provide a wholesale summary of my thesis, I do want to return to one of the
overarching themes that came across when I interviewed the women – that is, a muted
sense of belonging – and how I think this is playing out in relation to the current
political storm over temporary special measures.

So
what does ‘belonging’ mean and require of women in politics? And how does it
play out?Academic theorists like Breda
Gray (2002), Ruth McElroy (2002), Anne-Marie Fortier (1999), and Elspeth Probyn
(1996) have used notions of belonging to deconstruct how identities or
processes of identification are produced. They argue that individuals, groups,
or nations are constructed along dichotomous relations of insider/outsider, and
that these are often produced along racial, ethnic and gender lines. As Anne-Marie Fortier (2002) argues, the social and historical practices which mark out
terrains of belonging or commonalities amongst groups delineates the dynamics
by which people/groups fit into the norm. My argument is that an important
element of women politicians’ ability to belong to the ‘gendered spaces’ of
politics is conditional upon their ability to show they too can ‘fit in’. If we
assume that being a politician is an example of Fortier’s ‘group identity’ and
argue that through the gendering of this category as ‘man’ certain terrains of
belonging are marked out, then women’s ability to belong and be considered
legitimate politicians will be based on their ability to approximate the male
norms of politics.

If
part of this approximation entails being like one of the boys, then for women
politicians belonging is often weakened because of course erasing one’s gender
is never wholly attainable (or desirable). Thus, the women politicians I
interviewed were not completely excluded but instead were included differently.
One important strategy for belonging was through maintaining loyalty to their
affiliated political party’s ideology. It is within this context that I want to
examine the quotes by Irish women politicians when compared to coverage of
New Zealand women MPs’ reaction to Labour’s policy.

Yvonne
Galligan and Richard Wilford have done research on Irish political party
ideology and the implications for the ‘just add women and stir’ method of
integrating women into the party machinery. Specifically they assert that the
dual notions of equality of opportunity and loyalty in Irish politics obscure
men’s normative position within the party. It’s not surprising, then, that the
Irish women politicians I spoke to often simultaneously argued that the political
structures were gender neutral, and that the key to success within the party
was hard work and enterprise, while at the same time they contradicted themselves
with tales of battling against male elites that would not take their candidacies
seriously. Fidelity to the myth of gender neutrality and equal opportunity are
often used by women politicians to ‘fit in’, promising not to raise the fact of
their specific gender in return for legitimacy as politicians.

It
would seem that acts of loyalty to the status quo might require perpetuating
such myths, even if it’s to the detriment of one’s own political career or the
career of other women politicians. Take for example Politician I, who employed
a modest strategy for success, reasserting a model for working within a
predefined system of meritocracy This politician’s approach was to keep her
head down, show initiative, play along with the existing party structures and
hope for the best:

We [women] are a very tenuous group. So I suppose what I’m
kind of concentrating on doing is putting forward my own proposals, you know, work within the party structure to put
forward ideas, and if I can do that and do it competently and hope that I will be rewarded for it.
You know there is no guarantee but I think it’s the only solution because you
can’t just sort of… you can’t sulk and you can’t…it won’t get you anywhere
(Politician I, emphasis and bracket added).

Politician
Q asserted that if she had been a man, her seat would have been protected in
the last election and she would not have been set adrift by the party and
subsequently lost her seat. She stated:

But I think if I had
been a man with the sort of record that I had, I think they would have made
sure that I got back into the Senate. So I think it interrupted my political
career for five years… I wasn’t good
enough to have my career kind of protected somewhat or given an inside on
the 2002, which is completely
infuriating (Politician Q, emphasis added).

What she learned from this was the need to better align
herself and make strategic alliances with top ranking men in the political
party. “I mean if you look at our parliamentary party of course the male
network and I think you do have to penetrate
it and you do have to make alliances with men and I think a lot of women don’t
do that (Politician Q, emphasis added)”. This woman learned she had to show
loyalty to the party mechanisms and ensure her profile was raised enough to
have her career protected the next time around. Like Politician I, the strategy
was not to explicitly challenge the inherent gender inequalities that resulted
in the loss of her seat, but to penetrate the male network.

Specifically
discussing the topic of quotas, Politician B was adamant that special temporary
measures were detrimental to women, offering an example of where quotas were
used to increase the number of women on boards of Irish institutes of
technology. The following is an excerpt of that conversation:

Politician B: ... Sweden and Denmark,
people are always pointing to those countries and they say that’s how they got
their 50% women members of parliament because they got them all together and
said you’ve got to take this women now and this woman must be picked and ahhh
yuck. One tried it here. A Labour Minister for Education, Niamh Bhreathnach was
her name and she brought in that when you were appointing boards to run the
ITs, the Institutes of Technology around the country of which there are nine,
she brought in that there must be women on the board. And then they became
known as ‘Bhreacthnachs’ babes’ and every one said ‘oh she’s the quota woman on
that board,’ you know.

Morgan: So if you don’t have quotas
how… ?

Politician B: Well, nothing you just
have to make your way.

Morgan: You just have to make your way
and…

Politician B: …and it is tough.

While
acknowledging that it was tougher for women to make their own way, Politician B
offered no other solution for changing the status quo of women’s representation
than ‘just making your way’. Importantly, Politician B did not offer an account
of why people would assume the women elected through a quota system should be
seen as less than any other member of the board, instead fortifying that argument
in her own disapproval of such measures. Reading this quote with Politicians I
and Q above, it would seem that making one’s way is about acts of loyalty and
not challenging or questioning gendered constructs of political legitimacy.

Comparing
this with what I read in an article in the New Zealand Herald, “MPs
snub pro-women seats”, it would seem similar acts of loyalty are being
articulated by women MPs themselves. This article specifically cited Maryan
Street and her opposition to quotas in the selection process of Labour
candidates. Relying on discourses of equal opportunity and meritocracy, she
echoes many of the sentiments of the Irish women politicians:

Ms Street said it was hard enough being a
woman in Parliament without facing accusations of being there by way of gender. "I
think it's about competence. It's always about merit."

Similarly
invoking merit as an argument against quotas, Minister for Women’s Affairs, Jo
Goodhew said on Radio NZ:

What really bothers me about this is New Zealand has got an
amazing history of women who have been in amazing positions – chief justice,
governors-general, we’ve also had prime ministers. I think it demeans them for
any suggestion that women should be there because the time is right for a woman.
They were there because of their merit.

National's Judith Collins was dismissive of the proposal,
saying it showed Labour women clearly were not confident of being selected
under normal processes. "It is a surprise that they have so little
confidence in themselves."

What
all of these statements belie is the gendered nature of these ‘normal’
processes. By focusing on the processes, the conversation is shifted away from
examining the system itself. While processes are important, substantive change
is unlikely to be sustained if the underlying gendered nature and norms of politics
is not contested.

If
becoming a legitimate politician necessitates acts of loyalty and the perpetuation
of narratives about equal opportunities in order to belong to the gendered
order of politics, then it is perhaps unsurprising that some women politicians
are the most voracious critics. If part of belonging means trying to ‘fit in’
to a political norm based on ‘man’ and disavowing any gendered specificity, to
call for special temporary measures based on that specificity is dangerous for
many women politicians.

I am
not attempting to either condone or condemn MPs like Street, Goodhew or Collins.
Instead I want to provide a different reading of why some women MPs in
particular appear so threatened by a policy intended to increase women’s
participation and representation in the party. Ultimately, while I am fully
supportive of temporary special measures to increase women’s political
representation, I also believe it will take a lot more to ensure gender inclusivity.

So long as the political norm of politician is assumed as ‘man’, women’s
legitimacy in occupying the role of politician will continue to be fraught and
tenuous. The work of deconstructing and reimagining the political landscape to
ensure that intersecting identities (along the lines of race, gender, class,
ethnicity, and sexuality) are assured equal outcomes is essential. Part of
this process must include a more critical analysis of the discourses used to
discount attempts at equality, and how gendered notions of merit and equal
opportunity are invoked in the name of maintaining the gendered status quo.

6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I was looking forward to your post about this to see how complex you would make the issue. I hate politics because it is jobs for the boys and making it jobs for the girls as well won't undo that. I love it when people outside the supposed square get appointed to positions because their merit is compelling. Imagine a man in charge of NCW?

I liked listening to Kim Hill interview the new woman manager of the Bulldogs. The constant gender bias questioning was consistently rejected by the manager who pointed out that in the supposed male dominated world of league the team management, when the sex of the preferred candidate was raised, simply asked if the person was the best one for the job. To the team management nothing else mattered. They are light years ahead of the Labour party.

Do they, though? I've only heard male political commentators pontificate about this in New Zealand. And one of them is the fossilised Ye Olde Lefte Chris Trotter, so I'd be interested in learning what New Zealand feminists have to say about women-only candidate shortlists.

Personally, I support the idea.

That said, I also believe Parliament needs to be far more representative of LGBT community members and especially people with disabilities than it is. It is scandalous, surely, that Mojo Mathers was our *first ever* elected representative with a visible disability. How do we achieve gender parity and greater demographic representativeness within Parliament...and what about local government, for that matter?

For that matter, what about the likes of NZF's Asenati Lole-Taylor, whose attacks on street sex workers are ghastly and unconscionable ?

This may be more a matter of positioning themselves politically than genuine sentiment, though.

(PS: Re disability, bear in mind that there are, according to Deaf New Zealand, 9,000 deaf people in New Zealand, or roughly 0.2% of the population, so with Ms Mathers in Parliament, deaf people are now massively over-represented)

It'd be interesting if Labour ended up reaching parity without having a preset quota, wouldn't it, though? One wonders how the Greens handle this question...

And what about the argument that issues of political representation distract attention from substantive feminist issues like family violence, reproductive freedom, and fighting back against misogynist, racist and transphobic private members bills that threaten to recriminalise street sex work?

Thank you - at last some serious analysis. there is very little understanding here of the structural inequalities that exist in this country. It is not a 'man ban' it is simply a way of making parliament a more representative forum...a 'woman ban' has existed there forever simply because it is not a place that is conducive to family life. Women against this on the basis of 'merit' are ignoring the inequalities that prevent so many women of merit from even considering participating in politics.

Thank you for this really interesting blog Morgan. In the countries where they had quotas for women in parliament, was this a cross-party initiative? because part of what seems to be going on in the critique from politicians is that quotas give the opposing party too much opportunity to disparage members elected under them. I tend to think quotas for representation are an improvement to finding politicians from our current system, which encourages politicians to be wealthy and part of an established or powerful network with little view to whether they add something new or different.

I have worked in organisations where we had quotas on committees and so on to ensure representation and have found that people who filled these quotas brought views to the table that I otherwise didn't hear, and made decision making processes change as well. I believe this gave all of us much more rounded perspectives on decisions, though the processes sometimes took longer than they wuld have if we only had one or two dominant views at the table.